Company Overview

As one of the largest providers of financial services, Fidelity Investments manages more than 450 funds and custodied assets of more than $3.4 trillion, including more than $1.6 trillion in managed assets as of May 31, 2008. Once best known for its Magellan Fund, the flagship fund managed by name-brand fund manager Peter Lynch, Fidelity has since expanded its offerings to include retail brokerage, benefits and human resources outsourcing, investment management, start-up financing, and retirement planning services to 24 million individuals and institutions, as well as through 5,500 financial intermediary firms. The firm is the largest mutual fund company in the United States, the No. 1 provider of workplace retirement savings plans, the largest mutual fund supermarket and a leading online brokerage firm.

Fidelity also operates a leading online discount brokerage and has more than 125 investor centers in the United States. During the first quarter of its 2008 fiscal year, the company handled an average of 249,000 phone calls per business day from retail and institutional clients, and its Web sites handled an average of 2.4 million visits a day. It has more than 45,000 employees, and operates 11 regional operations centers: Cincinnati, Ohio; Covington, Ky.; Dallas, Texas; Raleigh/Durham, N.C.; Marlborough, Mass.; Merrimack, N.H.; New York and New Jersey; Salt Lake City and American Fork, Utah; Smithfield, RI; Jacksonville, Fla.; Albuquerque, NM, and Toronto, Canada.

For a long time, it looked as though Fidelity Investments was going to escape the scandals that rocked the mutual funds industry in the early 2000s, but in 2005 the news broke that Fidelity traders had awarded stock business to certain brokers who had given them excessive gifts. Fidelity has since changed its legal structure to become an LLC, which shields its owners from personal liability and assures all profits and losses pass directly to the owners without taxation of the company itself.